Ovid wrote lovingly of the loose straying of "soft Meander's wanton current", and in this beguiling book Jeremy Seal reveals himself equally in thrall to the wiggly Turkish river. Its very name, he writes, "encapsulates the freewheeling, romantic spirit that is the essence of true travelling".

Seal follows his river for 500km, from its headwaters at Dinar (the ancient Celaenae) to the Aegean, travelling with a collapsible canoe and staying in hotels or pansiyons, or as a guest in modest homes. He has been writing about Turkey for many years – his travel book A Fez of the Heart was well received in 1995 – and he speaks the language. Here he proves an informative, companionable observer of Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey), that hinterland "on the world's cusp" crowded with names that make this reviewer's heart beat faster – Phrygia, Lydia, Miletus.

Unafraid of cliché, Seal makes bold claims for his region. Anatolia was "the cradle of western civilization; it was the birthplace of history and philosophy, of Homer, Heraclitus and Herodotus, of coinage and town planning, and defining advances in medicine, mathematics and architecture". But he backs up these assertions with sound evidence. The book is diligently researched, and Seal makes good use of travellers who have gone before him.

More than half of this book is historical, and Seal purveys his material with an even hand. Migrants from southern Greece began to colonise the coastlands around the mouth of the Meander from the 10th century BC, calling the region Ionia and extending Hellenising tentacles. "The pressing question," writes Seal, "was how far the west might extend its influence inland into Asia before running into the torpid oriental headwind that traditionally blew there." The question presses still, though the wind is no longer torpid.

By the Byzantine millennium the once-great trade route up the Meander valley had lost out to more northerly passages. Seal is good on the forced assimilation of Christian Byzantines and Muslim Turks that played itself out during the Crusades, when both sides had to make compromises, living alongside one another in an era of tumultuous change. The disintegration of Ottoman hegemony after five centuries ushered in the modernisations of Ataturk. These included the introduction of western surnames, a process Turks embraced with gusto – Seal meets a Mr Flag, a Mr Trueblueyed and a Mr Fearless. They in turn take an interest in the author's phocine connection. Through it all, Seal gropes for an Anatolian identity that has persisted though so many changes of language and deity.

Throughout his account he judiciously twists the lens between the longer view and the close-up shot of a man lighting a cigarette, or a painting of Donald Duck on a slide in a playground. After watching the nation's beloved soap Wolves' Valley on a snowy café television, Seal examines what the series reveals about the Turkish psyche, and after reading an editorial on a newspaper tablecloth he dilates on current tensions between the governing Ak party of moderate Islamists and the country's secular establishment, which is backed by the military.

Seal loves Turkey with puppylike enthusiasm, and like the truest loves, he sees it clearly, with all its failings. Meander is funny. The author climbs a derelict tower for the hell of it, imagining the epitaph, "Died in a Minaret He Himself Had Caused to Collapse". This is not one of those man-books soaked in testosterone; Seal is keener to advertise his frailties: capsizing, for example, so that he has to hang his inadequate maps on a washing line, or looking in a mirror in a hotel to see that "One ear was draped with a spider's web and many catkins had snagged in my hair in the manner of miniature rollers."

The depredations of industrialisation mean that Seal ends up walking a lot when a damn, a fish farm or a superfluity of industrial effluence block his progress to the sea. "The Meander," he writes at one point, "was not proving the carefree experience I had imagined." Fallen willows are another menace, as are bloated bovine corpses. At Feslek, the river dries up altogether, and the hapless author is obliged to shoulder his canoe and follow a man making his way down river on a motorbike. But after the hoop-shaped gorge at the base of Mount Çökelez, in the broad, lower valley where the Meander is at its wiggliest, Seal's anxieties vanish just as the water gets salty. "I was doodling along as I had always meant to, and I felt fine."

In the spirit of the river, Seal can be wantonly discursive, dragging out episodes beyond their natural lifespan, not least because nothing much happens. But this is not a fatal flaw, and Meander is an excellent introduction to Turkish history for anyone planning a summer holiday.